I know nothing about farming so please bear with me. I see what you trying to achieve that will be great !! I still don't understand the mechanics of the system and the use of blockchain.
- Farmers will need hardware systems to autonomously grow food (FTF is working on engineering these initial systems and they most definitely will be "application specific"
)
Can you expand on that. Can you give a example what that system will look like ?
Here is a concept we developed based on the Omega Volksgarden:
In reality - the way I believe it will really look like will be something like a rectangular room that is ~10'x10'x10' with a 3 axis gantry robot (or several) that will plant and harvest the food in a completely controlled environment, akin to a clean room.
- The first tier integration of a blockchain - I'm hypothesizing - would be to track and secure (through a public ledger) the production of every plant grown in the network (what an upgrade from farming today right?). By "secure" I would define as the anonymous (or not) validation that: "this particular plant has been grown to standards as agreed upon by the consensus of the platform" (i.e. no detection of harmful chemicals founds (pesticides, fungicides, etc.); no disease witnessed during production cycle; etc.)
How you gonna track all that ? I mean how you gonna validate and how you gonna input it on the blockchain ? How could we prevent fraud ?
The tracking would occur through integrated sensory systems using pH sensors, C02 sensors, optical sensors, etc. - Let me be clear, this is going to be the toughest part of the project and I don't claim to know how it will work yet. There is a lot of research that needs to occur.
I have no idea how this information would be input on a blockchain (OR if it's even necessary) - not my core competency and looking to the community for thoughts and ideas on this one...
What kind of fraud are you thinking about?
In my mind - with regards to fraud - who's going to mess with their own food supply? If the data the nodes is providing is useful, it will help the rest of the network. If not - the information will not be utilized by very many nodes, or any at all. The goal is to create an objective platform.
- The second tier integration of a blockchain would be with regards to monetization and incentive structure for the farmer's themselves. As this would operate in the form factor of a decentralized neural network - there will inevitably nodes in the platform that are more efficient due to the input effort and knowledge of the corresponding farmer (THIS is where I believe the potential of a DAC TRULY exists. It's a network that can operate incorruptibly, but enables the input of human resources that can be capitalized.) I believe the network should objectively reward the most efficient farming systems as these are what the rest of the network nodes will strive to replicate and pull information from.
How do we incentivize a structure that rewards farmers for sharing information to make food production orders of magnitude more efficient, orders of magnitude less expensive, orders of magnitude safer for consumption & the environment, and completely incorruptible?
Don't understand the second tier at all. I don't see where is the incentive for a farmer to share any information.
I don't see the link between the two tier [/list]
Very good & difficult questions to answer - part of the reason behind starting this thread is to collect and organize my thoughts and get community feedback to help shape this project to the point of putting the idea into action. Keep the questions coming!
I'll start with regards to the multi-tier blockchain thoery:It may not be the right approach - but I envision the process of growing to be on a separate blockchain because of the "Proof Of Growth" (POG) concept, similar to POW. It would comparable to the mining process for bitcoin in which all mining rigs were useful in a way that all the energy pumped into the network were actually producing something useful; My thought process here is what if the POG algorithm were used for
manufacturing (growing fresh food); and the DPOS algorithm were used for the payment system. The variable I'm unsure about right now is which would be used to track & log the growth of each plant?
With regards to incentivizing farmers to share information:oco101 - I'm going to assume you and I probably don't live very close to each other. If we're both growing food - wouldn't it make sense for both of us to do that as efficiently as possible? Utilizing a similar personal home grow system - if you're growing with a 50% reduction in growth cycle times (let's say you can grow in 30 days and I'm growing in 45 days) AND you have a higher yield compared to how my system is growing - I'm undoubtedly going to want my grow system to learn about whatever information your system is collecting to improve the production of food for myself and my family to save resources (namely time and money). My hypothesis is the most efficient nodes are going to be those who's human input resources (via knowledge, testing, research, etc.) are greater than those of the less efficient nodes. I believe those who produce most efficiently should be paid dividends at a proportional rate of efficiency with respect to the rest of the network. Therefore, the farmers who inject more resources into the network (share more information) - will see a greater return proportional to how much of the rest of the network uses that information. As a whole - the entire autonomous food production platform will always strive in real time to grow as efficiently as physics allow. Does that make sense?
I *think* the constraining factor that must be met for this to occur is: the price of food for the least efficient nodes will still have to be less than what they would currently pay at the store today.
Show Posts
. Much like BitShares, we're looking to create an industry that solves problems for billions of people. Over the next 3-5 years, we'll be engineering the initial hardware development for the grow systems and bootstrap the development of the network to bring it online. I imagine many many opportunities for embedded systems startups to work in the space. 